The fact is, though, that pre-retirement decisions made by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, of Cedarville, who can’t seek re-election and must leave the governorship in January 2027, will bear some close watching.
For every governor, the last year or two in that office is legacy time — that is, when he (someday, she) strives to shape how public opinion will rate that governor’s stewardship. DeWine has been emphasizing a three-theme legacy:
- Boosting the health, well-being and school-readiness of pre-school and elementary-school Ohioans
- Promoting job growth in Ohio
- To the extent our slash ‘n’ burn General Assembly agrees, preserving and conserving Ohio’s natural and historic resources. (Forget for the moment the legislature’s and governor’s permitting fracking under state parks, which is grotesque.)
But if there’s a particularly noticeable policy thread running through DeWine’s governorship, it’s his steady if fairly understated opposition to capital punishment. That’s a major change from the days when DeWine, as a state senator from Greene County’s Cedarville in 1981, strongly supported restoration of the death penalty in Ohio.
Since Ohio resumed executions, 24 inmates were executed during Republican Bob Taft’s 1999-2006 administration, 17 were executed during Democrat Ted Strickland’s 2007-10 governorship and 15 were executed during the 2011-18 governorship of Republican John R. Kasich. Under fellow Republican DeWine, who took office in January 2019? Zero.
The governor has said that the impossibility of obtaining the proper lethal injection drugs is why Ohio has halted executions — for now. The fact is, though, that it appears procedural timetables already built into (temporary) stays of execution mean that even if lethal injection drugs were readily available tomorrow in Ohio, no executions would take place until DeWine’s successor is governor.
According to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, which runs state prisons, there are 113 inmates on Ohio’s Death Row: 112 men, housed at Ross Correctional Institution, in Ross County’s Chillicothe, and one woman, housed at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, in Union County’s Marysville.
Executions take place at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, in Scioto County’s Lucasville. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, about 55% of Ohio’s Death Row inmates are African-American in a state whose overall African-American population, the Census reports, is about 13.6%.
It would not be out of character for DeWine to announce, at some point before he leaves the governorship in 13 months, that he will commute the death penalties faced by Ohio state prison inmates to life without parole.
One factor: Although the governor is a practicing Catholic, he doesn’t wear it on his sleeve. But the official Catholic catechism, as updated by Pope Francis, teaches that, “in the light of the Gospel ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ and (the church) works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
And despite what would almost certainly be angry reactions from some of his fellow Republicans if DeWine commuted death penalty sentences to life without parole sentences, it doesn’t appear there’d be much GOP lawmakers could do about it, except gripe — which is something they’re really good at, session in, and session out.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com
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